Seriously, are there any real risks running a PC nowadays without a firewall?
 

Or router?

Enlighten me please

nope. go ahead.

what... Like it's safer then it used to be? HAHAHA, no... If you don't have anything protecting you, your computer will be found and malware / viruses / whatthefuckever will suddenly be on it. I would say within 1 day too.

I have gone without a firewall for years.. and nothing has ever happened to me. Unless of course I open a bad file, which is my fault. But never have I been hacked without any intervention on my part.

It makes me wonder if this 'security' craze is nothing more than paranoia

well, I use Zonealarm and I got this:
547803 Intrusions have been blocked since install
65979 of those have been high-rated

I installed it 4 months back

I feel much more secure when I see those numbers

well some routers have built in firewalls, so maybe thats why you have not had a problem. who knows, but it is pretty silly to go firewall-less if you have sensitive data on your computer... that is general knowledge man, seems to me you could get lucky and never encounter a problem, but why risk it?

no router either.

i just keep up to date with my windows updates

what's your IP, I'll check:winkwink:

Quickest ever PWNAge when I tried this was 30 seconds.

Yeah right. It's probably cookies.

bump......

and let me guess, you don't run an anti-virus either? :1orglaugh

sounds like your barebacking in the cyber world :winkwink:

same.. I also haven't used a virus scanner for I can't remember how long.Just this month I decided to try out nod32 because some people said it was good. Well I have about 2 years on this OS since my last reformat, the scanner didn't find a single virus or trojan.

The only thing I do run is adaware maybe once a month. I may keep the nod32 once the trial is up because it's very light on the system resources. Which was my major gripe about other virus scanners is they all seemed to be resource hogs.

But firewalls I just justa router.

I normally don't and I never have any issues.

post your IP, and "I don't use a firewall or anti virus" on a few boards.
we will take care of the rest.

I use to run without anything (no anti-virus, no software firewall) and I was just very careful what I did. I have pretty much always used a hardware firewall (router), which eliminates much of the shit door knocker stuff anyway.

However, over the last 6 months or so things have become intense. With the number of "in website" installs occuring, and with the sheer volume of crap coming down the pipe, I put on a trial version of Norton and enabled the standard windows tools.

Yesterday I purchased and installed Norton2007. Not the best product of the bunch, but toelrable and it isn't killing my system off (no, I didn't get norton internet or norton360, just the anti-virus part).

Myst, check your windows security settings. You very likely have the windows firewall activated (they try to do it by default now), and you might have windows defender running as well.

Good luck if you don't have anything, and I wouldn't recommend posting on any public boards about it.

My opinion is that you risk a lot by running a pc without a firewall,lots of mean people on the internet if you know what i mean...

Your PC is HIV positive by now. My condolences.